Meet Prachi Shah, Senior Service Architect

Akamai is home to many talented engineers who are constantly designing new, innovative products and improving existing ones. As the work begins, there is an absolute emphasis on understanding the needs of Akamai’s customers. That’s where Prachi Shah, a Senior Service Architect on the service enablement team, comes in.  

For an episode of The Developer’s Edge, I sat down with Prachi to learn how she bridges the gap between our developer customers and product teams. We discussed her career before Akamai, her current tenure at the company, and the crucial role feedback plays in improving our products and the developer experience. 

The customer comes first 

Prachi came to Akamai from tech startup Baynote, where she had exposure to the full cycle of creating technology solutions, from pre-sales to implementation. At Baynote, she held a number of roles, including business analyst, solutions engineer, solutions architect, technical project manager, and engagement manager.  

Prachi also handled troubleshooting calls and emails from customers, which laid the foundation for her customer-facing role she now holds at Akamai. “The experience really ingrained in me that the customer comes first,” she says. “It's really critical that whatever you're doing serves the customer in some way. That should be your number one priority.” 

Naturally fit for her ideal role at Akamai 

There were two open roles that were well-suited for Prachi when she interviewed at Akamai in 2015: solutions engineer and service architect. After a few meetings with the recruiter, however,  it was clear that the service architect position would best complement her previous customer service experience. It has been a natural fit from the start. 

As a Senior Service Architect, Prachi is an important link between the customer-facing global services and support teams and the product development and design teams. “This is a liaison role where we get to represent the viewpoints of customers, as well as all global services, within the product development and design process,” she says. 

Serving as a crucial connector 

Akamai’s global services team members have a wide range of expertise and perspectives. While some team members focus on strategic goals, others execute more technical tasks like helping customers improve their API performance. As a result, the feedback they hear from customers considerably varies. “The feature requests that they're bringing in will probably have more of a lens into their own functions,” she explains. 

Prachi’s role is twofold: (1) consolidate this feedback and turn it into a directive for the product and design teams, and (2) help the product and design teams prioritize their work based on the number of requests they’ve received. “I'm not alone in this process,” she says. “I usually rely on the experts within each of the global services functions, who help us rank the tickets in our queue and understand the issues at hand before I aggregate the feedback.”

Maintaining an iterative feedback process  

At Akamai, product launches are always preceded by ample planning. Prachi and her colleagues do their part by preparing ways for customers to communicate with them once a new offering is live. “We want to make sure that any time a customer has a question or needs help with troubleshooting, we have the necessary tools and documentation to help,” she says. 

Communicating with the customer doesn’t end when products launch. Prachi and her team often create blog posts, guides, and documentation about new products that customers can refer to, and even train teams directly on how to use Akamai products. “It is so much fun to go out there and answer their questions,” says Prachi. “The questions are so smart that they help us further improve on our documentation.”

Because Akamai often evolves its offerings, soliciting and responding to feedback must be a constant, iterative process. Customers can provide feedback on desired features or enhancements through numerous methods, including submitting a ticket or contacting their dedicated account team or support services. There is also a Slack channel that customers can use.  

“Slack is one amazing way to connect with customers directly,” says Prachi. “For engineering teams, it’s a great way to understand the lens of the customer and what kind of problems they’re facing.”

A commitment to a growth mindset at work and beyond  

Both in her work and personal life, Prachi is committed to a growth mindset. Before starting at Akamai, she completed a project management certification in her own time, which she found to be tremendously helpful “in terms of understanding risk and stakeholder management and the various stages of team building.” 

Prachi also taps into several other resources to improve her approach in her role, including a book club with the rest of the service enablement team. One book that stands out to her is “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” by Liz Wiseman.

“This book is phenomenal to understand growth mindset,” says Prachi. “In my role, it’s critical that you're always keeping the big picture in mind, and that you're also being gracious and giving. In addition, you need to understand how leaders function because you work with them frequently. This book has also helped me quite a lot in that sense.” 

Another favorite book of Prachi’s is “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey. After reading the book as a teen, she’s repeatedly referred to it. It has helped her understand how to perform at a high level, how to prioritize tasks properly, and when to say no.